The Wait
by HerRenegadeHeart
Summary: It had become Jemma's lifeline while waiting to be rescued from the bleak alien planet and though she knew it wasn't possible, she continued to wait for it to ring anyway.


_Author's Notes:_ HAPPY AOS TUESDAY! Today is the DAY, the day we get to find out what happened to Jemma! SQUEE! So excited! But yes, this idea came to me last night and I wanted to get it out before the episode aired!

* * *

Jemma was living in constant state of tension, waiting for the phone to ring.

 _Waiting for Fitz to call her._

Intellectually, she knew that couldn't happen. She was on a completely different planet and was God-only-knew how many lightyears away from the nearest cellphone tower. No matter how she wished, there was no way a phone call could reach her.

Still, she waited for it.

* * *

At the beginning, she had made videos while she'd waited, mostly to Fitz. About her observations, her findings, random tidbits she'd found interesting, then later about her worries, her fears, how much she missed him. Eventually though she'd realized that even with the advanced SHIELD battery technology, her power was running out.

It had been a heart-rending conclusion to reach, that she wasn't going to be immediately found, but once she'd forced herself to accept it, she'd tried to conserve the battery. She had turned the phone off, only switching it back on once a day (or what she figured for a day) and just for a minute to check for signal, to check for messages from Fitz. It was illogical, she knew, stupid even, but it was _Fitz_. If anyone could have found a way to boost a cell signal to reach all the way to across the universe, it was him.

She trusted Fitz, _she believed in him…_

And then the phone finally died.

By then, though, she had been there for… well, she wasn't sure of exacts, only that it had been far too long. Talking to Fitz had been her only solace in the desolate loneliness and after so long, her forlorn mind, grasping for anything of home to hold onto, was reluctant to let him go.

And so she didn't.

Something in her had broken and she knew it, but she chose to ignore it because somewhere deep down she also knew if she didn't, every last ounce of her will to survive would leave her and she would just give up completely. So she continued to talk to her phone, _to_ _Fitz_ , as if the battery had never died and some horribly desperate part of her had her truly believing that the logs were still being recorded.

Slipping into that state of mind was in big part a tactile thing. She would press the button on the bottom middle of the phone, feel the click, and that simple little sensation would trigger the self-soothing, almost hallucinatory state that refused to acknowledge that the battery was dead. She would even imagine the small things, like haptic feedback when typing on the keyboard and the distinct chime as she hit record on the camera.

Her brokenness also made her believe that the call could still come, and so she continued to wait for it.

* * *

The day she lost the phone had been the worst of her life. It was the day she'd given up hope.

She'd been running, trying to get away from what was chasing her and she'd tripped coming down a steep hill. She'd slipped and tumbled fast and out of control, only coming to a stop when she'd slammed hard into the dusty, rocky bottom. She'd wanted just to lie there for a moment to catch her breath, but she'd known that wasn't an option, so in a haze of pain and panic, she'd scrambled back up and limped quickly away.

It wasn't until later when she'd found some semblance of a safe place to rest (a laughable idea when living in hell, but it was at least somewhat away from the immediate threat) and had wrapped her wounds the best she could that she realized that her phone was gone.

Panic seized her chest and she couldn't breathe. The phone was her lifeline, her everything, and it was _gone_.

Forgetting (or perhaps not caring) about her safety, she tore back in the direction she had come, following her footprints and blood in the alien dirt in an effort to find the spot where she'd dropped it.

She didn't make it far though before one of the planet's dust storms hit, obscuring her vision and blowing away her trail. She had no choice, but run and find some place to hunker down in order to keep herself from suffocating in the billowing clouds of dirt and debris.

When it finally passed, she tried to return to her trail, but soon realized she'd gotten turned around in her scramble for shelter and worse, that the storm had blown the bleak landscape anew once more. She could have been standing right atop her trail and she wouldn't have known.

The phone was gone.

Fitz was gone.

Everyone was gone.

 _She was alone._

She felt something in her chest her snap and the pain, fiery and far too much, robbed her of breath. Unable to help herself, she dropped to her knees and just sobbed. She was alone, she was alone, she was _truly_ _alone_.

Eventually, as a way to keep herself alive and away from complete madness, she convinced herself that her phone was still out there, just waiting for her to find it. She convinced herself that the call was still coming and when it did, she would hear it. So though the phone was gone, the tension of the wait remained.

* * *

She'd seen the red light flash through the sky while searching for it and had attempted to locate the source. Something in the back of her mind had whispered "Flare" to her, but mostly in the dry, colorless surroundings she'd thought that the bright red had been beautiful and she'd wanted to see if there was more.

She was almost to the approximate location where it had originated from when the dust storm had appeared out of nowhere. She knew, _she knew_ , she should find shelter to ride it out, but desperation for something other than dark, bleak nothingness pushed her forward. If she stopped now, she would never find more of the bright beautiful red. If she stopped now, it would be like with her trail to the phone and the storm would wipe away any chance of her finding what she so longed for.

So she fought forward, stumbling but not faltering… and that's when...

"Jemma!"

She heard his voice, but she was so confused. _He couldn't be there, so how could she hear him calling for her when she hadn't heard the phone ring first?_

It came a second time ‒"Jemma!"‒ and this time she called back.

She followed the sound. If she could find the origin of his voice, she could find it ‒her phone! She charged forward, staggering through the raging dust storm, ...and suddenly he was there.

He was there _, he was there._ Struggling to reach her was _her Fitz_.

It didn't make sense. After so long, there was no way he could be there, yet somehow _he was_.

And when he reached for her, calling her name over and over, she reached out for him, too.

The tension of the wait was still there, but for the moment, it was overshadowed by confusion, disbelief, and an overwhelming desperation never to let Fitz out of her sight again.

* * *

She was back now, Fitz had come for her just as she had first imagined he would, yet she still waited, still remained in a constant state of tension… only this time phones _kept ringing_. It startled her every time, triggered her fight or flight reflex.

Though she hadn't told Garner about how the sound made her feel, of the fear that gripped her with every buzz, her discussions with him had made her realize that after so much time on that hellish planet, she had come to correlate that strange, on edge anticipation she'd felt while waiting for the phone to ring with the dread and terror she'd felt while being hunted.

It had been an odd, almost gleeful anticipation at first, waiting for the call, but that had turned into gut-churning, desperate apprehension that had then interlaced itself with the breath-robbing fear and panic of knowing she was prey to something else.

She wasn't sure of the exact moment that her longing had turned to dread, but she did know that it had happened pretty fast and after waiting all that time, after over 6 months of compounding tension twisting her into a trembling ball of anxiety, the actuality of a ringing phone was just far too much for her.

She did wonder what she would have done, what she would have felt, if the call _had_ come through. Would she have rejoiced or would she have panicked at the sound the way she kept panicking now? Would she have tried to stop it to keep the sound from attracting that which hunted her? Would she have even believed it was actually ringing after spending so long in silence or would she have thought it yet another figment of her broken mind? She just didn't know, but then she supposed it didn't really matter because it hadn't rung.

...Except it _did_ matter because the tension of the wait still remained, keeping her on edge, never letting her fully rest. She knew she couldn't live like this.

Garner kept telling her that she couldn't just ignore things and expect them to just go away. Trauma needed to be worked through. In her time, of course, no rushing, he said, but it was still something that needed to be processed.

And so now, as she lied on her bed in her room, she was trying to work through it.

The phone had never rung, Fitz's call had never come through, and that made her infinitely sad. It also left her stuck. What could she do? Ask him to give her a phone and call her? She didn't think that would work. It just wasn't the same.

Her phone had been her only lifeline out there, her only hope. She'd literally had nothing else. Here, back home, however, she was safe and protected and there were many lifelines to choose from, so many things to keep her from completely descending into madness.

...But maybe that was exactly the key.

Maybe, she considered, maybe what she needed to do was not try to ignore the tension of the wait, but rather modify it, replace it.

Or maybe there was something else she could wait for, a different outcome, _a different sound_.

There was suddenly a soft knock on the door. She rolled over on the bed to see Fitz popping his head inside and she couldn't help but feel a swell of warm relief in her chest. He held up his hands to reveal two cups of what could only be tea.

"Thought you might like a bit of company for… a bit?" he said, a small hopeful smile on his face that made her heart clench with both adoration and a dull touch of sadness. Could she ever be again what he wanted her to be?

Since her return it seemed that if Fitz wasn't at her side, he was on his way to be at her side and she'd lost count of how many times he'd stopped by "just because". She was still very much a bundle of nerves after spending over 6 months in hell and many of the knocks from the others startled her, but never Fitz's.

Those 6 and a half months couldn't erase the bond that had formed between them over their years together, not even the little things like being able to identify each other just by sound alone. She'd instinctively known his knock from the very first time she'd heard it after getting back, the familiarity of his unique, soft taps immediately offering her an odd sense relief and peace. Each knock reminded her that she truly was home, that Fitz was real and warm.

It reminded her that she was no longer _alone_.

In that moment she realized she didn't need to wait for his call now because he was _right there_. She realized that she could release that painful tension and finally take a proper breath again…

And, she decided, that maybe… maybe this, his knock, _her real life, breathing, smiling, not-just-a-voice-over-a-phone Fitz_ , was what she could wait for instead.

* * *

 _Author's Notes:_ This was a bit rushed in my effort to get it out before the episode aired (and I don't have a beta, haha), but I hope you still enjoyed it!

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